BioShock begins with a non-interactive cutscene, a surprising choice for a game that purports to be about personal moral choice and contextual storytelling. Then again, perhaps it is not so strange. While from a gameplay perspective it might be largely concerned with tactical and moral leeway, thematically it is about a loss of control. It is about what happens when idealism, ingenuity, and creativity are set free from the shackles of financial and ethical obligation. It is about a society which has plunged over the cliff, but which is still in its death throes, desperately and hopelessly clinging on and trying to delay its inevitable demise.

For the player, it is mostly about discovery--a slow, dawning discovery that is constantly being informed. For this reason, it is difficult to discuss what makes BioShock compelling without referring to specific environmental and narrative elements in the game, but I will attempt to avoid particularly crucial spoilers without warning.

BioShock's introductory cinematic, already in a first person perspective, notes that the game is set in the mid-Atlantic in 1960. It opens in a commercial aircraft just moments before the plane hits heavy turbulence and plunges out of the sky and into the ocean. The player is given control at that point and, after swimming to a nearby lighthouse, watches the ruined plane sink down below the ocean's surface.

"Who knows? Maybe we'll see that plane again," mentioned Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine, who introduced the game before setting the crowd of assembled journalists loose to play through the game's first few hours.

In the lighthouse, ornately adorned with iconic art deco embellishments, paintings, and classical sculpture, the player goes the only way available--down--to find a single, curiously inviting bathysphere. Upon entering, the bathysphere descends out of the lighthouse and along its preset course through the water, giving players their first glimpse of Rapture, the failed utopia that is at the center of BioShock. While on the ride, players will pass by sea life and grand underground skyscraper-like towers. Levine noticed that every structure seen during the bathysphere ride will be visited by the player over the course of the game. The effect is somewhere between Half-Life's unforgettable tram ride, offering just suggestions of the non-stop action to come, and Myst's pristine but deserted, realistic but surreal visual style.

Over these visuals comes the voice of Andrew Ryan, Rapture's architect, who has recorded a message to be played to all those coming to the underground city. "Is the man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?" he asks, going on to reject the ideas that labor is beholden to religion or to the state or to the public welfare. Rapture was created, he explained, to be a place where greatness is fostered, not limited. Ryan's speech smacks of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's rigidly idealistic, laissez-faire, dog-eat-dog philosophy illustrated in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The name "Andrew Ryan" even sounds vaguely like "Ayn Rand," and is likely derived from it.

"This game is all about idealists, about ideas going too far," Levine mentioned to me during a conversation after the play session. "The whole game is about that."

The bathysphere docks and the player is given the first glimpse of the world inside Rapture, and it is a startling change from the gleaming utopia seen just moments earlier. From behind the device's glass barrier, a man is brutally killed by some kind of mutant with scythes for hands. The bathysphere's door opens, and the Objectivist parallels are driven home when a new faceless voice is introduced, that of the guide character Atlas.

Atlas is of course the Titan from Greek myth tasked with endlessly supporting the celestial sphere on his back. In Rand's novel, one of the protagonists suggests that Atlas shrug--that is, throw off the weight of the world. The implication is that the world's intellectual and industrial giants should not be constrained out of false duty to humanity, the same implications made by Andrew Ryan as the catalyst for the creation of Rapture. The world of Rapture is plastered with reminders of its ideals; as one slogan reminds us, "The Great Will Not Be Constrained By the Small." Atlas is set up as a foil to Ryan, an opposing disembodied voice. Throughout the game, Ryan espouses his ideals, and Atlas condemns them.

Atlas promises to help guide you to safety if you will help him find his family. At this point the game proper begins. The interior of Rapture is desolate, decayed, destroyed. Water seeps in through cracks and seams, objects are broken and scattered, posters are faded and torn, and frustrated graffiti adorns the walls. "Ryan doesn't own us," proclaims one message. "Let it end, let us ascend," pleads another. Most striking--and suggestive--is the spray-painted assertion, "Atlas was right."

You soon find a wrench, which comes in handy when attacked by another of the crazed killers seen earlier. Combat in BioShock is stark and brutal. Enemy encounters are frequent, but by no means constant, which makes moments of silence in the dim, quietly chaotic world all the more nerve-wracking. Killing the enemy with the wrench is a visceral experience. Blood ejects from his head in viscous Gears of War-like globs, and the sound design is sickly convincing.

Continue reading for details on BioShock's player modifications, Big Daddies and Little Sisters, and combat nonlinearity.